She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Queer Resistance: Contesting State, Family, and Inequality in Post-Socialist China, with the following results:
Page 99 of the book is part of the chapter entitled “New Chinese Queer Personhood,” which argues that sexual identity formation among LGBTQ people in post-socialist China does not follow the linear, universal trajectory posited by individualistic, Western-oriented theories. Using biographical interviews and narrative data, the chapter illustrates how sexual identity formation varies across birth cohorts, social classes, and gender, and is deeply connected to local history and cultural context as well as broader social changes.Visit Susanne Choi's faculty webpage.
Drawing on the experiences of a middle-class lesbian (Wen) from a small town in Central China and a gay man (Leon) from a well-connected cadre family, page 99 explores how internal and international migration for education and work contributed to the sexual identity formation of those born in the 1980s. Their experiences highlight the struggles faced by this cohort of LGBTQ people in China and how globalization, digitalization, migration, and exposure to the work of Western scholars such as Sigmund Freud and to queer cultures in Taiwan helped them overcome their initial rejection of their sexual desires and gradually accept their sexual orientation.
For example, on this page, Wen recounts how, while browsing the internet, she found her “type” in the image of a good-looking T (tomboy) from Taiwan, and how searching for this T led her to discover lesbian online communities in China. The page also documents how Leon became aware of his longing for male intimacy when he saw attractive male actors and male bodies on television and in magazines. He initially rejected these desires because of his traditional upbringing and his aspiration to lead a normative life that his conservative family would approve of. At university, he even dated girls on and off in an attempt to correct his desires for men. However, an academic exchange in Taiwan brought him into contact with pop-rock bands that wrote and performed songs about homosexuality, university courses in which homosexuality was discussed, and, for the first time, a gay pride parade. These experiences laid the foundation for an ongoing process of sexual identity negotiation.
The Page 99 Test is a fun test, but I am not sure it works particularly well for my book, which weaves together individual biographies and broader social changes while attending to variations in queer lives across birth cohorts, social classes, and gender. It is impossible to capture the complexity of the relationships between personal biography and broader social change on a single page.
In fact, the Page 99 Test might lead a browser to mistake the book for a collection of biographical interviews and overlook its broader aim: to explore changes in queer lives and the unevenness of these changes across social classes and gender, and to connect individual challenges and decisions with collective resistance by queer communities, government policies, transformations in heterosexual marriage and family, and China's growing social inequalities.
The book goes beyond documenting and analyzing changing queer lives in post-socialist China. It also provides a window into broader transformations of intimacy in China and other non-Western societies. The challenges and constraints LGBTQ people experience are directly connected to heteronormativity and to the institutions of heterosexuality. At the same time, changes in these very institutions, including the decline of marriage and parenthood globally and in East Asia, and transformations in family life, have also provided important resources and opened up greater possibilities for LGBTQ people to negotiate non-normative life trajectories.
--Marshal Zeringue
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